I always love these spring walks through our fields with The Shepherd, old meadows coming to life with early flowers in bloom feeding hungry early pollinating insects, which hum all around, birds singing and flitting about collecting food for young chicks. One hopes the worst of the winter has been left behind as days grow longer and nights shorter. Throughout April The Shepherd keeps an eye out for our annual migrants, the birds who return to repair, rebuild or build new nests in the barns and sheds. We like how the swallows feed on pests and insects, which will have started to annoy sheep in the evenings or early mornings.
When our swallows arrive home to Ireland it usually bodes well as they glide in on a bow wave of a front of warm weather. When they first arrive they’re often exhausted and swoop in to land on overhanging cables, their excited chitter-chatter filling the air. This is also when The Shepherd shakes her finger at myself, Ovenmitt and Miss Marley, giving us all a stern lecture about not catching, killing or tormenting our visiting long-distance travellers. One of us usually fails at this when a tired swallow glides in too slow and too low. With an athletic twisting leap from one of us, the demise is quick. Later, when swallow chicks are close to fledging out, and readying themselves for their first flights across the yard, we find our way across hazardous as swallows dive-bomb, peck and torment us.
At night, birds still hungry from winter sit on their recently built nests to incubate their first batch of eggs. Luckily, they cannot see their hermaphrodite neighbours, the worms, come out to dance a sensual reproductive ballet among themselves. When soil softens after rain I can hear worms disconnect from each other to slip back into their holes to avoid being trodden on as I pad over their kingdom of rich soil. Sometimes when The Shepherd walks across a field by torchlight to check on a lamb or sheep, her beam of light illuminates the worms vulnerable above ground. It’s not the light that disturbs them, but her footsteps vibrating through the ground a ripple that disturbs the cavorting worms, who rapidly withdraw back into their holes in the ground.
At this time of year, if we haven’t done so in autumn, we spread granulated lime over fields that need their acid pH brought up to a neutral level (more about this later) to grow grass well. This farm job is one in which our preparation and clean-up take the most time, as our equipment must be cleaned after use to keep lime and condensation from corroding the metal bits of our spreader and seizing up the working parts. When The Shepherd races around the fields on the quad towing the spreader to scatter the lime granules, Pepper loves to ride behind her on the quad’s rear end, watching out for a rabbit or squirrel to chase. I, however, usually hop on board for a spin up to the yard when The Shepherd has stopped the quad and dismounted at a gate to open it. Pepper and I then share the ride, me up front on the warm engine cover, while he stands behind The Shepherd.
In May, what we call ‘fairies’ dance in the long, low evening light above the sheep’s heads, beneath the branches of the larch trees. These insects, with their long transparent wings, are called lacewings, The Shepherd tells me. They are my favourite May event, apart from the newly risen cow parsley, the king of wild flowers, which blossoms in our woods and shady hedgerows in May. It towers above me as I stroll behind The Shepherd and wend my way through their forest of green stems. A sea of white lacy blossom floats above me as dappled sunlight seeps through the thickening tree canopy above us. Our sheep love to munch on cow parsley leaves and savour their flowery heads. They rub their heads and bodies against the stems to break them apart and cover themselves with parsley juice. Wise sheep do this because they’ve learned that cow parsley juice naturally repels annoying flies. So, when the sheep are let into fresh pasture, they race to wherever cow parsley grows. They munch it and rub themselves thoroughly until only a few stubby stems remain. Despite this annual abuse by my sheep, cow parsley has a deep vigorous root which enables its return every year as long as a percentage of its leafy greens get to feed and store its needs with enough sunlight.
When I first came to Black Sheep Farm all those years ago, I apprenticed myself to the worldly old feline Oscar. Oscar taught me everything I know. In those days, well before I came to take over, there were no sheep on The Shepherd’s farm. Wildlife, Terrier Tassie, and cats Tabitha and Tina occupied the territory. A farmer rented our fields to graze cattle eleven months of the year. Then, when Oscar was a teenager, The Shepherd was given a few orphaned lambs from whom we’ll call the curly-haired sheep farmer, a friendly neighbour whom she had known since they were children. Back then she could not afford to buy sheep to breed. She made a pen from wooden pallets. At lambing time she found straw and borrowed a heat lamp. She collected small plastic drink bottles, bought a rubber nipple to fit them, and bought artificial sheep milk. Oscar then and there decided that it was his first duty to help keep the lambs warm under the heat lamp and secondly to clean their faces after they had finished each milky bottle-feed. He carefully attended orphan lambs, especially when the heat lamp was on. I’m told the humans sometimes couldn’t tell what was cat and what was lamb in the pile of small bodies asleep under the lamp. Oscar loved to walk with the lambs. While they were his cat size or smaller, his tail often curled over their backs to reassure them as they followed The Shepherd outside the pen for the first time. During feeding time he sometimes flopped on his side and played with a lamb’s tail. Their tails have a lively life as they suckle their mother ewes or lamb formula bottles. Tails spin and wriggle as the lambs’ bellies fill with warm milk. At other times Oscar sat near the lambs’ heads and leaned over to lick dribbles of milk that seeped between bottles and lamb lips as they suckled. Oscar was also a dedicated assistant gardener. He enjoyed nothing more than freshly dug rich earth for a good back roll. He diligently kept our Gardening Boss robin away from any worms that turned up in a recently dug flower bed.
Unlike me, Oscar’s past is no mystery. He was born on a small farm in Curraheenavoher, near Ballymacarbry in the Nire Valley, County Waterford, in the foothills of the Comeragh Mountains. He came to Black Sheep Farm as a weaned kitten as there was a need for new blood to reduce an expanding rat and mouse population. The farm cats at that time were siblings Tabitha and Bettina, who was called Tina. They were The Old Guard felines from The Shepherd’s grandparents’ days. Both were aged happy cats. Tabitha was a plump tabby and loved a human lap, I am told. Tina was shy, lean and black. They arrived at our farm as kittens, having been thrown in a brown paper bag onto the road by some despicable human. The Shepherd’s grandmother spoilt them rotten with saucers of milky tea and cuts of well-buttered toast. Neither cat had any interest in hunting unless an animal of prey variety literally fell into their laps – which is indeed what happened one day, The Shepherd tells me, in one of the stories she finds so amusing.
One day, as she sat at the kitchen window, fat Tabitha, in her elderly manner, lounged and dozed under a horse chestnut tree. While Tassie the Terrier snuffled in nearby grass, she unearthed a pheasant who had been crouched and thought itself hidden. It jumped up, raced around the tree, straight into sleeping Tabitha. Tabitha leapt up in shocked surprise, extended her claws and killed the bird in the blink of an eye. The Shepherd ran outside for a closer look. She saw Tabitha proudly drag her prey by its neck between her front legs to a secret location in order to privately partake of her surprise feast just as her wild panther cousin would.
Cat Oscar, on the other hand, had been raised as a kitten by his mother on fresh farmyard mouse meat and was therefore an excellent candidate for the role of rat-and-mouse-killer-cat. Oscar’s calm easy-going demeanour belied a strong hunting instinct. He was not a chatty cat, but the strong silent type, who always purred steadily but quietly whenever he popped into a human’s lap. What I most liked to do companionably with Oscar, other than to curl up with him on a cold winter’s night in the stable hay for more warmth, was to hunt for rabbits. This was one of his favourite occupations, so I was very glad to be taught by such a keen expert.
However, I have to confess that from my